Video recorders are among the most popular consumer electronic devices in the marketplace. The most common type of video recorder is the video cassette recorder (VCR), which records several hours of video in analog format on a magnetic tape cassette. A VCR can record a television program received from a local antenna or from a cable system for later playback. Most VCRs can be programmed to record video from a user-selected channel beginning at a user-selected start time and ending at a user-selected end time.
More recently, however, video recorders that use computer magnetic hard disks rather than magnetic cassette tapes to store video programs have appeared in the market. For example, the ReplayTV™ recorder and the TiVO™ recorder digitally record television programs on hard disk drives using, for example, MPEG-2 compression. Disk-based recorders have numerous advantages over conventional VCR devices, including:
1) the ability to view the start of a television program while the end of the program is still being recorded. This allows a viewer who misses the start of a program to jump back and watch the program from the beginning, and then catch up with the ongoing television program by skipping the commercials;
2) the ability to pause while continuing to record a live program. This allows the viewer to pause the live broadcast to answer the phone, eat, go to the bathroom, and the like, and catch up with the live television program, again by skipping the commercials; and
3) the ability to record on any part of the disk that is blank. The blank portions of the disk need not be contiguous and the viewer can watch stored programs in any order.
However, a disk-based video recorder, like a conventional VCR device, is still limited in the amount of video content it can store. Despite recent dramatic increases in the storage capacity of hard disks and the development of new storage media, like read-write digital versatile disks (DVD-RW), the number of programs that can be recorded on a single disk remains relatively limited. Thus, as the computer hard disk becomes full, the prior art disk-based video recorders either cease recording or, with some limitations, overwrite existing programs. Unfortunately, the manner in which the prior art disk-based video recorders overwrite existing programs is relatively crude. The prior art disk-based video recorders may simply record new video programs beginning at the start of the disk or may overwrite the oldest existing program on the disk.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for improved disk-based video recording devices. In particular, there is a need in the art for a disk-based video recorder that is capable-of intelligently selecting an existing program to be overwritten by a new program based on a variety of criteria. More particularly, there is a need in the art for a disk-based video recorder that selects an existing program to be overwritten based on criteria that are at least partially determined by viewer (user) preferences.